Tag Archive for 'garden'

What if you received a mailing from a company and it was actually something beautiful? With this card, you could even try planting it. This oversize postcard for Northern Lights Landscaping was designed by WestmorelandFlint and is letterpress printed on a plantable paper containing wildflower seeds. We would say they have easily surpassed the typical beauty threshold of your garden variety direct mail piece.

We letterpress printed this 10 x 5.75 card in two colors. The stock came from our new friends here in the midwest at Porridge Paper. It is their Plantable Seed Paper, Ecotan 110lb Cover, wild flower mix. This paper does produce a beautiful sculptural letterpress impression. A cautionary note on those wildflower seed inclusions – it also makes a really big mess inside the printing press. After running several thousand sheets through the cylinder press four times, we had enough wildflower seeds inside the machine to plant a small meadow. A fun mailer AND good times cleaning up afterwards.

We recently finished this rather large letterpress wedding system designed by Priya Patel. Check out her fashion forward blog Love Made Visible. We asked her about the design:

Priya: “The background for the design is that the couple are to be married in a botanical garden and the bride Neerja was really inspired by traditional Indian miniature paintings which often depict figures in natural settings. She wanted to incorporate a painting with her invitation so we printed one on vellum as a cover sheet for the invite.”

Priya: “We needed to design invitations for not only her wedding in Virginia, but also a reception the weekend after in Texas that is hosted by the groom Neel’s parents. We also wanted both events to be linked visually, thus the full color nature elements.”

Since the invite was sized for a large A10 envelope, that made for a very large 13 x 20 press sheet that incorporated all the wedding cards. In this wedding, there were two main invite cards – the brides invitation and the grooms invitation. Plus the other reply cards, direction cards and sangeet invitation. That’s a lot of letterpress! Producing multiple pieces on the same press sheet keeps the cost down.

We produced the design from Priya with a combination of letterpress and digital printing. Digital printing is used for the vellum sheet and the back of the reception card. All of the navy text is letterpress printed. The paper stock is 111lb (300gsm) Canaletto Grana Grossa 20% cotton from Gruppo Cordenons. We also die cut the contrasting navy paper for the folding enclosure using French Papers Nightshift Blue and mixed our printing ink to cordinate with the navy paper. The minimal typography and ornamental detail of this design were perfectly suited for letterpress printing and produced a beautiful sculptural impression.